Siblings determined to reconstruct facility

The country has to be rebuilt, and rebuilt forever,' former Bethesda resident says

Dominique Verella, a former Bethesda resident, stands in front of one of the ruined buildings at a medical and education facility run by her brother, Dr. Michel-Henry Brutus, on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince. It took 20 years for Brutus to build the facility, called HELP, which is destroyed.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI  In the plantain fields of Vaudreuil, there used to be a place where people learned what their world could become.

Framed by the mountains to the east, on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince, the cluster of buildings was the life's labor of Dr. Michel-Henry Brutus. Over two decades, Brutus built a hospital, a maternity ward, a pharmacy and an agricultural center where young people could learn to grow crops. Fifty pregnant women and 100 children every day were fed at Brutus' clinic, part of his HELP Inc. health and development organization in Haiti.

Brutus' sister, Dominique Verella, a dozen years removed from a quiet life in Bethesda, used her brother's work as an inspiration. After spending most of her life as an educator and child care worker, she planned to start a forestry school in the mountains. Brutus was about to open an orphanage at his Vaudreuil HELP facility.

It is all gone.

The afternoon of Jan. 12, Verella and her sister, Regine Brutus were going to visit the grave of their father, Ludovic Brutus, in whose honor the pavilion at HELP is named. Suddenly, the road beneath them shook and buckled.

"I thought it was a coup," Verella said.

This was not an idle observation. She and her family fled Haiti in 1990 following political unrest. She lived in Bethesda for about eight years while her oldest daughter Ayisha, now 20, attended Lyceé Rochambeau on Forest Road. Her husband Frantz, a former Minister of Public Works in Haiti, took a job at the World Bank. She volunteered to teach Haitian children French, and appreciated the relative peace and quiet. She enjoyed the cherry blossoms in the spring.

But she missed how the leaves never fell from the trees in Haiti. She longed for the opportunities to help Haitian people. In 1998, when her family deemed it safe, she came back.

"It's not my country. That's it," she said of her time in the United States.

After the shaking stopped on Jan. 12, the ravaged carcasses of buildings and the bodies of the dead were before her. At that moment, and for days after, the wails of her countrymen rang in her ears.

"People were yelling, because they had lost two, three, four kids at a time, entire families," she said.

Her youngest daughter Fredgina, 3, was watching television at a neighbor's house when the shaking started and houses began falling.

"They just had time to pick her up," said Verella, 49.

Her son Jeremi, 12, was at school and was not hurt, and her husband Frantz was spared injury.

It took Verella two hours to walk home, where she found that her house in ruins.

The first thought that shot through Michel-Henry Brutus' mind after the shaking stopped was: "I must find my family." He had just left his father's grave when the earthquake struck.

But he stayed to help the wounded in the street for several hours, then came home thinking his family was dead. His three children and wife survived, and are in the Dominican Republic, along with Jeremi and Fredgina.

Brutus and Verella count themselves lucky. Many of their neighbors and close friends did not survive.

One of Brutus' darkest memories is of a 22-year-old Mexican woman visiting her fiancé in Port-au-Prince. He tried to resuscitate her in the street. She was dead by the time her fiancé arrived at Sacre Coeur Hospital with the woman on the back of a motorcycle.

Verella and Brutus are staying with their sister Regine Brutus. They sleep outside, fearing that another aftershock will bring the walls down.

"I can't imagine how they are going to rebuild this country," Verella said, staring out of a truck window at Port-au-Prince's streets and waving at the scene with a despairing hand. Several times she muttered, "Oh my god," like the spoken half of Port-au-Prince's dismal, silent catechism.

The second devastating blow for Verella and Michel-Henry Brutus came when they saw the HELP clinic in Vaudreuil. Every building was either badly damaged or destroyed. Their orphanage collapsed before it could help its first child. The agricultural school's water pump, capable of producing 650 gallons per minute, was broken. An $80,000 surgical microscope from HELP's hospital was gone, along with other medical equipment and supplies, snatched by desperate Haitians.

"They looted my hospital," said Brutus, 54. "You name it, they took it."

And the church their father built in Vaudreuil, Église de St. Joseph, across from HELP's crucial water pump, was almost reduced to a jumble of broken stone. But the front of the church and the cross at its pinnacle remained upright.

"We have to rebuild that church," Verella said.

The HELP facility was empty when Verella and Brutus pulled up to it Saturday evening, although one family was standing not far from the gate, as if waiting to be let in for medical care like any other day. Inside the walls, the second floor of the pharmacy had dropped over the first one, crushing it completely. Part of the maternity ward was still standing, but it had deep cracks running up its walls.

Brother and sister did not go inside. They stared at the wreckage and spoke to each other quietly, Verella leaning on her brother's shoulder.

She paused at the remains of a small building outside the walls where the staff used to congregate during breaks. A pastel blue door remained upright, hanging limply off a doorframe left standing in the rubble, like a surrealist vision.

"We used to have parties here," she recalled.

At Brutus' side Saturday night was Vital Pierre, the doctor's assistant for 15 years who helped to maintain HELP. One of the collapsed buildings is named after him. He said he had an opportunity to move to the U.S. before the earthquake but is now determined not to leave so he can help Brutus put two decades of work back together.

"Given my devotion to Haiti, I had to stay. I had to make the choice to stay," said Pierre, in French. "I'm working until things get better, to see that HELP is being rebuilt."

An engineer who worked on HELP's buildings, Pierre Belancé, also wants to see the facility returned to what it was.

"Without this hospital, everyone in the locality would be in so much trouble," Belancé said, standing in the courtyard with Brutus and Verella.

Attached to a fence bordering nearby farmland in Vaudreuil, a sign read "Land for Sale" in French. Brutus had intense conversations on his phone throughout Saturday evening, planning how to get HELP back on its feet.

After the earthquake, Brutus was managing to treat patients in two of HELP's health annexes in the Port-au-Prince area. Another HELP annex was still standing but was structurally unsound. No electricity was available in one and the supply of medicines only stretched over a few shelves. He is giving basic care to about 100 patients a day.

Verella is convinced that when Haitians deforested huge swathes of country to make room for shantytowns and other short-sighted uses, they weakened the ground and caused the earthquake's damage to be greater as a consequence. For this reason, despite the disaster, she still wants to continue with plans to build a school of forestry in the mountains.

"It's a lot of work to change the mentality of a population," she said.

While the country once had 60 percent forest cover, Haiti had dropped to 1 percent by 2007, according to one estimate from the International Conference on Reforestation and Environmental Regeneration of Haiti.

On the matter of education in general, Verella was thinking big, determined that at least one pillar of Haiti be rebuilt. The child care worker and planner inside of her were still forging ahead.

"Let's say 75 percent of schools are gone," she said. "So, we'll need more schools and educators. It's one of the foundations of a nation."

She brushed aside any concerns for her security. Politics may have driven her from Haiti once before, but the motions of the earth would not do so again.

"At this time, this moment, we cannot leave. We have to stay," Verella said. "The country has to be rebuilt, and rebuilt forever."